Author: Luke

Book of Making volume 1

The Book of Making volume 1 contains 50 of the very best projects from HackSpace magazine, including awesome project showcases and amazing guides for building your own incredible creations. Expect to encounter trebuchets, custom drones, a homemade tandoori oven, and much more! And yes, there are some choice Raspberry Pi projects as well.

The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book volume 4

Volume 4 of the Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book is once again jam-packed with Raspberry Pi goodness in its 200 pages, with projects, build guides, reviews, and a little refresher for beginners to the world of Raspberry Pi. Whether you’re new to Pi or have every single model, there’s something in there for you, no matter your skill level.

Both books are available as free PDF downloads, so you can try before you buy. When you purchase any of our publications, you contribute toward the hard work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, so why not double your giving this holiday season by helping us put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world?

A what now?

If you don’t know what a tricorder is, which we guess is faintly possible, the easiest way we can explain is to steal words that Liz wrote when Recanthamade one back in 2013. It’s “a made-up thing used by the crew of the Enterprise to measure stuff, store data, and scout ahead remotely when exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilisations, and all that jazz.”

A brief history of Picorders

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have seen other Raspberry Pi–based realisations of this iconic device. Recantha’s LEGO-cased tricorder delivered some authentic functionality, including temperature sensors, an ultrasonic distance sensor, a photosensor, and a magnetometer. Michael Hahn’s tricorder for element14’s Sci-Fi Your Pi competition in 2015 packed some similar functions, along with Original Series audio effects, into a neat (albeit non-canon) enclosure.

Brian Mix’s Original Series tricorder

Brian Mix’s tricorder, seen in the video above from Tested at this year’s Replica Prop Forum showcase, is based on a high-quality kit into which, he discovered, a Raspberry Pi just fits. He explains that the kit is the work of the late Steve Horch, a special effects professional who provided props for later Star Trek series, including the classic Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations.

This episode’s plot required sets and props — including tricorders — replicating the USS Enterprise of The Original Series, and Steve Horch provided many of these. Thus, a tricorder kit from him is about as close to authentic as you can possibly find unless you can get your hands on a screen-used prop. The Pi allows Brian to drive a real display and a speaker: “Being the geek that I am,” he explains, “I set it up to run every single Original Series Star Trek episode.”.

5. Locomotive

There’s a new issue of HackSpace magazine on the shelves today, and as usual for the Pi Press it’s full of things to make and do!

Adafruit

Makers love making hardware, and they’d also love to turn this hobby into a way to make a living. So in the hope of picking up a few tips, HackSpace spoke to the woman behind Adafruit: Limor Fried, aka Ladyada.

Adafruit has played a massive part in bringing the maker movement into homes and schools, so Limor’s words of wisdom will be a big hit in the magazine.

Raspberry Pi 3B+

As you may have heard, there’s a new Pi, and that can only mean one thing for HackSpace magazine: they have tested it to its limits!

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is faster, better, and stronger, but what does that mean in practical terms for your projects?

Toys

Kids are amazing, says the Raspberry Pi Foundation! Their curious minds, untouched by mundane adulthood, come up with crazy stuff that no sensible grown-up would think to build. No sensible grown-up, that is, apart from the engineers behind Kids Invent Stuff, the brilliant YouTube channel that takes children’s inventions and makes them real.

They spoke to Ruth Amos, entrepreneur, engineer, and one half of the Kids Invent Stuff team.

Buggy!

It shouldn’t just be kids who get to play with fun stuff! This month, in the name of research, they’ve brought a Stirling engine–powered buggy from Shenzhen.

This ingenious mechanical engine is the closest you’ll get to owning a home-brew steam engine without running the risk of having a boiler explode in your face.

Tutorials

They is also plenty full of tutorials to make, so get going!

Copies of HackSpace magazine are available in selected stores across the UK, including Tesco, WHSmith, and Sainsbury’s. They’ll also be making their way across the globe to USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Belgium in the coming weeks, so ask your local retailer whether they’re getting a delivery.

You can also purchase your copy on the Raspberry Pi Press website, and browse the complete collection of other Raspberry Pi publications, such as The MagPi, Hello World, and Raspberry Pi Projects Books.

You can use the micro:bit for all sorts of cool creations, from robots to musical instruments – the possibilities are endless. The micro:bit is a handheld, fully programmable computer which was given free to every Year 7 or equivalent child across the UK. It’s 70 times smaller and 18 times faster than the original BBC Micro computers used in schools in the early 1980s.

This little device has an awful lot of features, like 25 red LED lights that can flash messages. There are two programmable buttons that can be used to control games or pause and skip songs on a playlist. The micro:bit can detect motion and tell you which direction you’re heading in, and it can use a low energy Bluetooth connection to interact with other devices and the Internet – clever!

Be a tech pro of the future with the micro:bit. The digital world is your oyster.

Read this blog on how to get started with David Whales BitIO library. (here)

Introduction

This code uses the Micro:bit as an interactive controller in Minecraft. You can read all about it in BitIO blog 1 here to fully understand how to set it up and run it. But suffice to say that the Brains behind it is David Whale. Over the course of the the last 8 months I have been integrating the Micro:bit into my Minecraft coding experiments.